Google is a new proprietary competitor to KDE

Now it finally happened. Not hat I have not talked about the Google problem in the past, but now it is really obvious that they do not follow the FOSS-Desktop development, but rather try to get everybody store as much information on the web (crawled and advertised by them) as possible. Google Chrome OS will be born. It won’t even be based on X, and will use Chrome as the main interface, so it is mainly around client-to-server http/html communications, which require storing all your personal data elsewhere, outside your control. It is a new competitor to all desktop environments, a proprietary and free (as in beer) competitor to FOSS, which is much more dangerous than MS is, since FOSS can always beat MS’ price. It is proprietary because the actual apps+your data are outside of your control handled on their webserver. Has anybody seen the code for GMail yet?

Chrome OS will have the opposite target of what FOSS tries to achieve. FOSS tries to give you total control of your software and therefore by its very meaning control of your data. Google tries to abuse FOSS work for a hidden thin-client layer to their web-apps, because otherwise they would not benefit from you working with your data.

What to do? Well sitting here and complaining won’t stop the “web 2.0″ and its general push of user’s data to www-based servers. This is actually the main problem and imo an enormous waste of ressources, since every well designed gui and interface on the desktop has to be redone in html+js (remember even opengl getting integrated in the browser by google?) and you have to create an enormous storage and ressources on servers. I’ll post a follow up about some thoughts of P2P integration.

Cheers,
whilo

p.s.: I have waited for more than a day to post this, because I’ve thought the most dangerous new competitor to the FOSS desktop might get at least some attention on the planet, but it seems that google is somewhat masked out from critical consciousness. Instead far less important problems, like tomboy being in default debian install or not/is c# evil or not, get discussed everywhere… Instead of avoiding the Google problem in FOSS activism, it is really necessary to face its problems, if people still take the FOSS goals seriously. If FOSS people wouldn’t “bitch” around Google that much, they could actually help to raise the consciousness of the dangers associated to a giant centralized information pool. That is what I have experienced FOSS like when I have started to work with it in the past.
It was not to be mainstream, but to rather question the usage of software and assign certain ethical principles to it, especially in regard to your freedom. Is this all lost?

This entry was posted on Freitag, Juli 10th, 2009 at 00:49 and is filed under Allgemeines, FOSS, Google, KDE. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.